What do we do with what we’re given?

There have been various writers and thinkers of many different sorts who have tried to answer the question — or at least to pose it clearer terms so that some future thinker might answer it — of what can we do with what we’re given? There is the famous quote from Marx’s Brumaire:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

And Heidegger’s inquiry into thrown-ness in Being and Time. In one’s own analysis, if one chooses that route, one encounters this question often: How much of what I want is mine? And how much is theirs [insert any external — but most likely one’s parents]?

In her book on Winnicott, Laura Dethiville says the following:

The baby comes into a world that existed before him… a universe where in theory his place is already inscribed… He will find his place at the junction of these two genealogies [that of the desire of one parent; and that of the other], defined by the signifiers that preceded him in the transgenerational impact. This is how the infant finds himself facing the enormous task of encountering the world ‘at the same time strange and familiar, in order to translate it in the actual terms of his existence’ (Roustang, 1994).”

And although this sounds remarkably Lacanian (I suppose this is the result of a French analyst writing about Winnicott), it is deeply universal to the human struggle in which family plays a central role. Perhaps in other cultures, it might not — but where we are concerned in family-centric corners of the world, it speaks volumes. Why is it that the infant is confronted with the “enormous task” of translating itself “in the actual terms of his existence?” Why can’t it just — say new things?

And this question can’t be dismissed by the oft-quoted truism that it’s really just words are at fault. Music and sex and other non-verbal activities are much better at expressing my actual existence. Music and sex and other non-verbal activities, after all, are also inherited. From where does one get one’s affinity towards this or that style of music? Or even of music at all? Indeed, some people seem remarkably unmoved by music and sex altogether.

No, the question is rather about the positioning of one’s very innermost desires. To want at all is to be within a context of wanting and not wanting that we have received from elsewhere. The two genealogies which birthed us into existence, which ‘threw us’ into this world are evidently not sufficient for the infant; it has to struggle with its givens and its ‘actual existence,’ whatever that might mean. A structuralist or constructivist might dismiss a separate existence as ‘actual’ altogether: all we are are inherited beings. Foucault’s early work on sexuality is particularly exemplary of this position. But so are strict naturalists and political conservatives. On the other hand, the other pole, we have spiritualists, Christians (was Christ not the one who rejected all before him?), revolutionaries (except of the orthodox Marxist kind), and libertarians.

But most people, if not all, do not fully subscribe to any one of these dogmas; they, as Nolan’s Oppenheimer says, “need some wiggle room.” And it turns out that the wiggle room most people need, infants above all, is where it comes to one’s actual existence.

Another way of asking is “Why aren’t we doing the same exact things that people did since the beginning of human beings?” Some might answer: ‘We are! The basic structures of myth and/or evolution have not actually changed, they only look different.’

This is a pressing question not only accessible to political theorists and anthropologists. Indeed, at the heart of the suffering of a great many individuals is the question of “What do I want?” And, “When do I leave home?” It’s the same thing, I think, at the corner of the Lacanian expression of ‘articulating the desire of the unconscious’, particularly because of its pairing with the other axiom: ‘The unconscious is structured like a language.’ Which one is it? Is desire of oneself or of the Other?

But it would take an enormous amount of exegesis in many cases to have this argument stand. The work of anthropologists, for instance, would make it mightily difficult to reduce the rich differences in different cultures to a handful of basic mythic structures. But even if this is true; if, as Ruth Benedict argues, cultures are expressions of a few different ‘traits,’ why have these expressions shifted at all?

Dethiville apropos Winnicott pushes on: “We only find what we have created and we only create because we find. It is individual creative activity that defines a unique psychic reality” (2019, p. 41). But this is not naïve Romanticism (hold Keats). We do not encounter a world because we think it. That would take back the Winnicottian point mentioned earlier on: that we are born into and because of the desires of those that precede us. Though he isn’t commonly thought of as such, Winnicott may turn out to be quite the dialectical theorist.

We move here to a direction of ‘use’: What is ‘useful’ to the child, for Winnicott, is a good-enough family, a family not harmful to the inward development of the child’s capacities. Capacities for what? First and foremost: for creativity.

Creativity (the act of participation in one’s environment) can only take place if the signifiers within which the infant is embedded allow for the ‘right-amount’ of flexibility. Too much, and the infant will remain in the stage of ruthlessness marked by narcissism and magic. Too little give, and the infant will learn that active participation is dangerous and met with retaliation.

Winnicott has faced criticism for being mother-blaming, but this is not so. Of all the psychoanalytic thinkers, he is probably the least damming to the mother and father. All he requires for the optimal facilitation of creativity is “good enough.” Creativity is essentially the child taking what is given and producing something slightly different or maintaining what was given. Even in the most radical of outcomes, i.e., revolution, we borrow language from previous movements, something Marx pointed again in the Brumaire:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Let us continue this passage in full:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793–95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

Can we say the same of the individual? Are Winnicott/Dethiville and Marx saying the same thing? I think so.

It seems that, from infancy, we are dammed to speak (with) our parents’ tongue. But is this so bad? Are borrowed goods ruined? Perhaps it is the promise of constant new-ness that we seek to rid ourselves completely of genealogy; or maybe this struggle, the ‘encounter’ as Dethiville puts it, is built into us, and that’s why new things have such a strong hold on us.

To return to ‘use’: the family must allow and be open to being used by the infant. If they are not, s/he will never learn what it is like to make something one’s own, take it in actively and reconfigure it as farce.

References

Laura Dethiville, The Clinic of Donald W. Winnicott. (2018)

Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte. (1852): https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/